by Katie Shox…
If you’re a writer, but you don’t generally produce any images, you’re lucky. You may not think so, but in broad terms the Internet has your back. But if you produce images and don’t generally write, you’re in an entirely different situation. Unlike writers, you will receive little or no respect from the Internet, and that disrespect starts right at the top, with huge powers such as Google and the social media sites, who tacitly encourage what’s quaintly referred to as the “sharing” of other parties’ image matter. Continue reading Photographers: Don’t Blame The Content Thief
We’ve all seen them. Internet forums built around nothing but stolen content. Photos lifted directly from Google Images, and text cut-‘n’-pasted wholesale from blogs and websites. Post after post it’s simply “Quote…”; followed by someone’s entire, copyright-protected blog entry. No permission, no link, no attribution. And sometimes the material is not even acknowledged as a quote. A blogger wouldn’t get away with this, so how come so many forums do? Continue reading Content Theft on Forums: What Can Be Done?
This post provides a synopsis on why the things you want are not on the Internet. If you’re after an actual guide to effective Google searching – finding those hard-to-locate goodies, please see How To Find Everything On The Internet.
Digital applause – the combination of Likes, Thanks, +1s, Favourites, Follows, positive comments and various other expressions of appreciation – is a major component in keeping the Internet free. Of course, it doesn’t keep the actual ISP service free. That’s always going to have to be paid for in one way or another. But the supply of accessible material – the photographs, articles, music, etc – a very high proportion of that is legitimately free, and it’s paid for in large part by digital applause. Continue reading Why You Can’t Find What You Want on Google
It was with a tired sense of disillusionment that I stared at the new DuckDuckGo interface a couple of days ago, realising that it was no longer an option, and that this was now, in a word, “it”. I’m not quite sure what it is about companies redesigning websites that don’t need redesigning, scrapping whatever it was that made you like them, and making the user experience worse, but it’s happening all the time. I thought Microsoft would be hard to beat when they turned my favourite email service – Hotmail – into my least favourite – Outlook. But DuckDuckGo have gone one better with the huge update they’ve just made. Or should I say, one worse… Continue reading DuckDuckGo – ing To The Dogs
I recently wrote a piece about the music scene looking at how some of the hottest new artists are getting radio airplay but failing to register on the public radar. I put this down to a number of things, but perhaps one of the most unexpected causes was the manner in which the Internet is conditioning us to like people not on merit, but based on whether or not they’re going to like us back. Continue reading You Scratch My Like Button – I’ll Scratch Yours
